Imperfect Perfection

This is the per­fect planet for some­thing, but most of us do not know what that some­thing is. For the major­ity of peo­ple it seems like an unnec­es­sar­ily dan­ger­ous place. This planet is prone to floods, vol­ca­noes, hur­ri­canes, tor­na­dos, droughts, and earth­quakes. It boasts a plethora of tiny spi­ders, snakes, and large ani­mals that can kill peo­ple (and they often do). The human body itself is fraught with bio­log­i­cal haz­ards that can make life mis­er­able or even end it com­pletely. Given time, the body fails for all, so what is the point? On a grand social scale, his­tory is replete with mean­ing­less wars, geno­cide, and untold amounts of pain. Every­thing seems so flawed. What is going on here?

What appears to be an imper­fect lit­tle ball, in a uni­verse of such grand forces that it could eas­ily crush this planet with­out so much as cre­at­ing notice­able dust, is really the per­fect set­ting for the per­fect­ing of the imper­fect. Given a few more bil­lion years, this planet is toast any­way. Its sun will super­nova and that will be it. The ques­tion remains: “So what is being accom­plished in the mean time?”

Much actu­ally! Per­fec­tion is in process. Spirit and mat­ter have come together to form and/or per­fect some­thing that will out­live the uni­verse itself. Those of us caught in the whirl­wind processes and forces of the near-century it takes to do so feel like metal in a forge or clay on a potter’s wheel. We are spun around in world events, ham­mered by the demands of fam­ily and job, and gen­er­ally caught in the pains of seem­ingly end­less edu­ca­tional tasks and life stages that never give us enough time to stop and be just where we are.

Per­fec­tion takes patience. The end result is not in this life any­way. The per­fect­ing of the beau­ti­ful soul is appar­ently to be pre­ferred to fight­ing the inevitable decay of the human body. We are too con­cerned for the mold and its tem­po­rary pur­pose. The but­ter­fly does not worry about how bad it looked as a cater­pil­lar. It has other things to do — like float and fly high above the sticky mis­er­able leaves upon which it once crawled.